Conversation: Martha Bergland & Chuck Stebelton *HYBRID*
In-person at Woodland Pattern and live streaming via Crowdcast.
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Join us as we welcome author Martha Bergland, in conversation with Wisconsin Master Naturalist volunteer Chuck Stebelton, discussing her new book, The Birdman of Koshkonong: The Life of Naturalist Thure Kumlien. Presented with Milwaukee Audubon Society.
Thure Kumlien was one of Wisconsin’s earliest Swedish settlers and an accomplished ornithologist, botanist, and naturalist. He settled on the shore of Lake Koshkonong in 1843 and soon began sending bird specimens to museums and collectors in Europe and the eastern United States, including the Smithsonian. Later, he prepared natural history exhibits for the newly established University of Wisconsin and became the first curator and third employee of the new Milwaukee Public Museum.
For all of his achievements, Kumlien never gained the widespread recognition of Wisconsin naturalists John Muir or Aldo Leopold, yet his detailed observations of the Midwest’s natural world were hugely important to the fields of ornithology and botany. As this carefully researched and lovingly rendered biography proves, Thure Kumlien deserves to be remembered as one of Wisconsin’s most important naturalists.
Martha Bergland is the coauthor, with Paul Hayes, of Studying Wisconsin—a Society Press biography on famed Wisconsin naturalist Increase Lapham, which won the Milwaukee County Historical Society’s Gambrinus Prize. She taught for many years at Milwaukee Area Technical College.
Chuck Stebelton is the author of An Apostle Island (Oxeye Press, 2021) and two previous full-length collections of poetry. As a birder and Wisconsin Master Naturalist volunteer he has offered interpretive hikes for conservancy groups and arts organizations including Friends of Cedarburg Bog, Milwaukee Audubon Society, Woodland Pattern, Friends of Lorine Niedecker, and the Lynden Sculpture Garden.
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